Libertarians like to refer to their ideal state as minarchist, meaning government ought to minimally intervene in the economy and affairs of the people, but can a state be more minarchist than a libertarian state, without descending into complete anarchy?

I think it can, for example, I'm not sure if this is an essential component of libertarianism, but you could do away with intellectual property rights, meaning you could say open up a Starbucks, without paying tribute to Starbucks, which would mean less intervention in the economy.

You could also only protect the property of people who use it.
For example, if someone were to purchase property, but fail to use it, after a while, say one year, they would forfeit their ownership, and it wouldn't belong to anyone anymore, it'd be up for grabs.
Whoever starts living there, if anyone, to them belongs the property.
This would mean government would intervene less in the economy, because it would recognize fewer things as property.
It would also mean governments conception of property or who owns what would be more fluid.

There's all sorts of ways a state could intervene less than even libertarians are advocating, and reducing state intervention in such ways could be beneficial for society.

I think it can, for example, I'm not sure if this is an essential component of libertarianism, but you could do away with intellectual property rights, meaning you could say open up a Starbucks, without paying tribute to Starbucks, which would mean less intervention in the economy.

Uhm, that's a fairly cavalier approach you have to throwing away the entire patents system. Have you thought at all about what benefits it offers us all?

You could also only protect the property of people who use it.
For example, if someone were to purchase property, but fail to use it, after a while, say one year, they would forfeit their ownership, and it wouldn't belong to anyone anymore, it'd be up for grabs.
Whoever starts living there, if anyone, to them belongs the property.
This would mean government would intervene less in the economy, because it would recognize fewer things as property.
It would also mean governments conception of property or who owns what would be more fluid.

You don't get a minimal government by creating a giant bureaucracy just to keep track of when every item of property was last used.

So I could walk into Starbucks expecting a decent cup of coffee but end up with a mug full of dishwater? Well,
okay, if you think it will lead to a better society.

If someone says they're selling you coffee, and they sell you dishwater instead, that's fraud, they could be charged.
If people make crappy coffee, they lose their customers.

By getting rid of intellectual property and franchises, we do away with the economy being monopolized by a tiny cabal, we do away with a system which isn't very democratic, more plutocratic.

Furthermore, intellectual property isn't really property, in fact it's theft.
What's violent about someone peacefully copying what you do in order to make a profit?
Nothing.
Or they may not be copying what you do, it's just you might've been the first person to copyright what many people are doing.

If they physically go there and start using it, then it becomes theirs again, if not, too bad, it's no ones, until someone, anyone starts using it.

It's totally unnatural, unnecessary and plutocratic for one man to be able to accumulate thousands of times more property than he can ever actually occupy or use himself.

It's unnatural because something like that would never happen in the state of nature.
In nature, when you leave something, whether it's a place or thing, and never come back, or come back years later, you would expect it to be gone, or someone or some group to be occupying or using it.
By now, you would expect this person or these people to have more familiarity with it than you, and to have much more invested in it than you.
They would think of it as their place or thing now, and so would you, even if you tried taking it from them.

It's unnecessary because a man can live, and live well in an apartment, he doesn't need to own hotels all over the world.

And it's plutocratic because again, several dozen families controlling 50% of the economy is hardly democratic.

We, as a democracy, ought to have a conception of property that's more holistic, based not just on, did you buy this, or was it given to you, but who's occupying/using it, and who needs it.
That's a more egalitarian and social conception of property, where as the current one is absurd and antisocial.

There's nothing violent about some squatters occupying an abandoned piece of land or property no one is using, it's not really theft, no one was around to take anything from.
You really have to, have something, in order for it to be yours, in order for someone to take it from you, or at least regularly occupy or use it, how could something be yours, if you never even set foot in it?

Last edited by Gloominary on Mon Aug 21, 2017 4:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

You don't get a minimal government by creating a giant bureaucracy just to keep track of when every item of property was last used.

I was thinking more of real estate than items, government already keeps track of real estate.
There'd be less property in such an economy, and therefore, less intervention.
Less intervention means less bureaucracy, fewer taxes.
More stuff would belong to no one, or to nature.

You don't get a minimal government by creating a giant bureaucracy just to keep track of when every item of property was last used.

I was thinking more of real estate than items, government already keeps track of real estate.
There'd be less property in such an economy, and therefore, less intervention.
Less intervention means less bureaucracy, fewer taxes.
More stuff would belong to no one, or to nature.

Governments maintain a minimal set of who last registered the purchase of land. It is a trivially cheap system to maintain and consumes only the tiniest fraction of your taxes. What you propose requires regular assessment of who is currently using land, and if you stop to think about that you will realise that this information is nothing unless you record also for what purpose they use it and probably many other details. It certainly would not be as cheap as the existing land registry services in whatever country you are from. Even if you are French.

Your thinking has been far too shallow, you are proposing to replace a system built over centuries through use with one constructed in what appears to be an afternoon of daydreaming without wasting any effort on detail. That failure to take any detail into account is why you are fooling yourself that this impossible task you have set is actually easy.

I can't even begin to understand why you would suggest that only property under use should be protected, and apparently at random decide that the only thing which is now property is land. If I place wallet (which I can assure you I consider to be my property) on a table at a cafe, and somebody swipes it, I think the law should punish that person. But now the wallet may or may not be property at all, and it may or may not be property I am using. I don't understand what your proposal is because you are making it up on the fly or else are using wildly general terms for specific things.

Governments maintain a minimal set of who last registered the purchase of land. It is a trivially cheap system to maintain and consumes only the tiniest fraction of your taxes. What you propose requires regular assessment of who is currently using land, and if you stop to think about that you will realise that this information is nothing unless you record also for what purpose they use it and probably many other details. It certainly would not be as cheap as the existing land registry services in whatever country you are from. Even if you are French.

I think this is a fair criticism.
Perhaps it would be easier just to limit the amount of real estate people can have.
You can have as much as you, personally, could possibly regularly use.
Owning dozens of homes or thousands of acres of land all across the globe would be out of the question.
Of course where we draw the line would be somewhat arbitrary, but isn't that how every line is?
The line between illegal and legal drinking age is rather arbitrary, isn't it?
The line could be both pre-decided, to some extent, by philosophers and social economists, and decided on a case by case basis, to some extent.

Your thinking has been far too shallow, you are proposing to replace a system built over centuries through use with one constructed in what appears to be an afternoon of daydreaming without wasting any effort on detail. That failure to take any detail into account is why you are fooling yourself that this impossible task you have set is actually easy.

No it hasn't been too shallow, relatively speaking, you make it sound as if I'm in a position to implement such a system.
Every idea has to start somewhere, I have a life time to work out the details of this system in my head and on forums such as this, what's the rush?
And I never said it would be easy, or could happen overnight, just that I think principally at least it would be superior to the system we have now, in many very important regards.

I can't even begin to understand why you would suggest that only property under use should be protected, and apparently at random decide that the only thing which is now property is land. If I place wallet (which I can assure you I consider to be my property) on a table at a cafe, and somebody swipes it, I think the law should punish that person. But now the wallet may or may not be property at all, and it may or may not be property I am using. I don't understand what your proposal is because you are making it up on the fly or else are using wildly general terms for specific things.

See my posts above for some of the reasons why I think it's a good idea.

I never said the only property was real estate, just that my primary consideration at this time was real estate.

As for small items, I say either we keep things the way they are now, as I only really care about real estate, and it's easier to keep track of, or, if you lose something, and someone else found it, not only would you have to prove it was 'yours', that you bought it, made it or it was given to, and not only would you have to prove that you lost it, but you would have to prove you lost it 'recently' (weeks or months ago), in order to reclaim it.
If you lost it a long time ago, or it was sitting around for years or decades unused, than you wouldn't be able to reclaim it.
But if something was stolen from you, from your hands, or from your car or house, than you could still charge the thief and reclaim your item, no matter how much time went by, because it was yours and you were using it when he took it from you by force.

I don't know why people are defending the current system so vehemently, I mean how much are they paying you?
The system we have in place now, where a small percentage of men have a massive percentage of wealth, and the environment is being destroyed, is totally unsustainable, we need to start experimenting with new systems, and yes, they won't be perfect, holes will have to be patched up, and some of those holes may not be able to patched up, or very well, but when you have gaping holes like we have today, when the alternative is the annihilation of mankind and life as we know it, I don't see how the alternatives could be any worse.

It's time to experiment, break laws, and in general, fuck shit up.

Find ways to topple this plutocracy, return the wealth and resources to the people and to nature.

So yea it's finders keepers to some extent, that's the principle, balancing this new principle with the present one.
You may have bought something, or made something, or something was given to you, but are you using it, have you even used it?
I mean leaving your house to go to work, and then coming home to find someone occupying it is ridiculous, but then owning homes all over the place, jacking up the prices, charging people an arm and a leg to rent or buy them, or not doing anything with them, just letting them sit there, or using them once in a blue moon when you go on vacation to this country, or to that one, is also ridiculous.
Having thousands of more things than you need and use when some people don't have a pot to piss in is obscene, like obscenely rich.
Return them to the people or to nature.

With all this property lying around, being squandered, it costs wealth, resources and tax to maintain it.

If poor people had more of what they need, they wouldn't have to work as hard making so much stuff for what rich people desire.

How can libertarians claim to be minarchists when capitalism tends to increase the size of the economy a hundred-a thousand fold?

The more stuff there is, the bigger government has to grow to keep track of all of it, tax it, regulate it, protect it.

Rather than redistribute the stuff, which's costly, cumbersome and authoritarian, like socialists propose, you can just redefine property, like I've attempted to do in this thread, say we're going to stop protecting this stuff as much as you'd like us to, and let it naturally redistributed itself.

In the state of nature, you can't have a lot of stuff, you can only have as much stuff as you need and routinely use.

A bird can build, maintain and possibly protect a nest, a beaver a dam, they can't build hundreds-thousands of nests and dams, and then charge others to use them, or have a nest or dam of their own, wherever they go in the world.

The system we have is wasteful and gluttonous, it needs to be modified, or destroyed.

If people couldn't have much more than they regularly, routinely use, than they'd have less incentive to overproduce.
If they had less incentive to overproduce, the earth and its creatures, including us, might be saved.
You don't even need a planned economy, just stop defending peoples stuff when they have a lot more than they use/need, and let nature take care of the rest, and do away with 'intellectual property' too, of course.
You would cut back both on government services and taxes.
Such a system would be closer to anarchy, and nature.

Governments maintain a minimal set of who last registered the purchase of land. It is a trivially cheap system to maintain and consumes only the tiniest fraction of your taxes. What you propose requires regular assessment of who is currently using land, and if you stop to think about that you will realise that this information is nothing unless you record also for what purpose they use it and probably many other details. It certainly would not be as cheap as the existing land registry services in whatever country you are from. Even if you are French.

I think this is a fair criticism.
Perhaps it would be easier just to limit the amount of real estate people can have.

I stopped reading there because what's the possible point in wasting any more time.
There cannot be anything less libertarian than proposing to limit the property people are allowed to purchase using funds they are entitled to spend.
If you somehow need that explaining to you, I personally can't be bothered.

Governments maintain a minimal set of who last registered the purchase of land. It is a trivially cheap system to maintain and consumes only the tiniest fraction of your taxes. What you propose requires regular assessment of who is currently using land, and if you stop to think about that you will realise that this information is nothing unless you record also for what purpose they use it and probably many other details. It certainly would not be as cheap as the existing land registry services in whatever country you are from. Even if you are French.

I think this is a fair criticism.
Perhaps it would be easier just to limit the amount of real estate people can have.

I stopped reading there because what's the possible point in wasting any more time.
There cannot be anything less libertarian than proposing to limit the property people are allowed to purchase using funds they are entitled to spend.
If you somehow need that explaining to you, I personally can't be bothered.

Keeping with libertarianism, in a sense, you're not forcing people to do something, or not to do something, people can still accumulate as many places and things as they want, it's just after they've accumulated a certain amount, government stops both taxing, and defending them, and people are free to occupy and take them, which's exactly what would happen without government intervention.
This is more anarchist than libertarianism, yet more libertarian than anarchism, it's a synthesis.
And it's a superior definition of property, my definition, infinitely superior.